Jewish History, Popcorn Included
What if things had been different? What if, instead of claiming a permanent home in Palestine, the displaced Jews of Europe had settled for a temporary claim on a sliver of Alaska? Or what if, just as Hitler was undertaking his murderous, expansionist policies, an anti-Semitic popular hero had been elected president of the United States and had visited upon America’s Jews a set of policies that combined Jim Crow and the Nuremberg laws?
Those are the conceits of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” by Michael Chabon, and “The Plot Against America,” by Mr. Roth, novels that are much more than thought experiments tracking an alternative story of the Jews in North America. But such experimentation is nonetheless rampant at a time when the bonds of history seem to have loosened and when the imaginative possibilities, the varieties of available Jewish experience, have expanded at an almost dizzying rate. In Israel, in the diaspora, in every religious denomination and style, in a proliferation of cultural initiatives from hipster Yiddishism to Hebrew hip-hop.
All of which may be the current face of that sturdy old crisis. “Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?” a seductive neighbor — a desperate Jewish housewife — asks Larry Gopnik as she hands him a joint. Larry’s confused, ambivalent response is nothing new. Freedom has never been an entirely comfortable concept for a people whose deity bestowed upon them more than 600 commandments and who have historically feared not only annihilation, but also dissolution.
Emancipation in 18th- and 19th-century Europe turned out to be a mixed blessing, and in America in the 20th century assimilation was both an aspiration and a worry. Pious shopkeepers looked on with pride and dismay as some of their most brilliant and ambitious children made a great show of casting off parental strictures and the fetters of custom and claiming their individualist American birthright...
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Those are the conceits of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” by Michael Chabon, and “The Plot Against America,” by Mr. Roth, novels that are much more than thought experiments tracking an alternative story of the Jews in North America. But such experimentation is nonetheless rampant at a time when the bonds of history seem to have loosened and when the imaginative possibilities, the varieties of available Jewish experience, have expanded at an almost dizzying rate. In Israel, in the diaspora, in every religious denomination and style, in a proliferation of cultural initiatives from hipster Yiddishism to Hebrew hip-hop.
All of which may be the current face of that sturdy old crisis. “Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?” a seductive neighbor — a desperate Jewish housewife — asks Larry Gopnik as she hands him a joint. Larry’s confused, ambivalent response is nothing new. Freedom has never been an entirely comfortable concept for a people whose deity bestowed upon them more than 600 commandments and who have historically feared not only annihilation, but also dissolution.
Emancipation in 18th- and 19th-century Europe turned out to be a mixed blessing, and in America in the 20th century assimilation was both an aspiration and a worry. Pious shopkeepers looked on with pride and dismay as some of their most brilliant and ambitious children made a great show of casting off parental strictures and the fetters of custom and claiming their individualist American birthright...